I’m not altogether clear on the argument. If, say, I’m an addict, is any assistance I’m offered by anyone by definition therapeutic? Is all pastoral counseling therapeutic? Is all prayer therapeutic? Is all Bible study therapeutic? Or is it only therapeutic when, for example, the prayer and Bible study are done in groups, rather than by individuals? Would that make communal worship therapeutic (on the assumption that all of us are somehow wounded or broken and turn to prayer and worship out of a recognition of our neediness)? Is the opposite of "therapeutic" "self-reliant"? -- Joe Kippenberg
Maybe the best way to answer the questions are to take them one by one. First, addiction. Earlier this month, I posed a question to which my Scene colleague the Sude had an evocative response.
So why [I asked] this inability to get over ourselves and get over people we’ve been emotionally intimate with? Human nature or immature mega-wank? Or a misplaced guilt fix?
The answer [Peter replied] is addiction — and like all addictions, few who suffer from it will admit a problem.
In the context of our exchange in question, the hipster addiction was to "romanticism about feelings" -- celebrating and obsessing over the emo experience, even as emo highschoolery gave way to the arch, sullen, jaded, ennui-laden poses of postponed adulthood. I mention this because one of the hallmarks of the therapeutic as I recognize it today is an evolution beyond the addiction-denial routine: the self-conscious recognition of addiction couples with a pragmatic effort to dial down the obsession to manageable levels of pleasure and desire. In super-advanced cases, like Pete Doherty's, mostly this results in lip service that cannot actually break the addiction. Sometimes such cases throw themselves on the mercy of drug care practitioners and are cured of their habit. But often genuine cure is impossible, and the best an addict can hope for is to gingery segue from a smack addiction to a methadone addiction. And even an initial escape from withdrawal and use often must give way to a stalwart coping mechanism in which gallons of coffee (cf. Shangri-La-Di-Da-era Scott Weiland) is accompanied with "just taking it one day at a time." Simply trying to get someone not to be an addict is not, in the way I think the term needs to be understood today, 'therapeutic.' Settling for helping someone avoid or mitigate the pain of being an addict is. This includes helping someone clean up for the main purpose of hitting the streets again, which is pretty much what happens with rehab in significant parts of LA (for instance). You use until you're a wreck, go get unwrecked in Taos, and start partying again. Yes, this is a luxury mostly only celebrities can afford, but remember how many more celebrities there are than ever before, and remember how many people make the sort of living off of the celebrity industry that can support both a drug habit and a rehab habit.
Neither pastoral counseling nor prayer, then, is necessarily therapeutic. Talking with a minister or a priest, on my understanding, is supposed to push you toward the painful resolution of contradictions in your soul (you want to be virtuous, instead you are sinful, a behavior that's hard to stop should be stopped, etc.). This is just the opposite of the therapeutic. But I daresay large swathes of Christianity are accepting the notion that pastoral counseling is supposed to make people feel better first and foremost, and that bumming them about about sin and damnation is the wrong way to go. Of course you can discuss sin and damnation and redemption too without bumming someone out, but only if both you and they have faith in the grace and authority and power of God, and the shared conviction that people are the responsible governors of their own right and wrong conduct (or even thought). But this 'sends the wrong message' to flockmembers who want all the love of My Pal Jesus and none of the wrath of God. Prayer is read in medical terms: who cares how it works (or if), as long as it makes people feel better. Who are you to tell them not to use whatever means are at their disposal to cope with suffering? But indeed that sidesteps the main question, which hovers around the fact that prayer, as I understand it, has this alternate function and significance which is namely to beseech the Lord for strength in rough spots and praise Him in smooth ones. Put bluntly prayer is about to whom the prayer is prayed, even more than it is about the person doing the praying. Often times prayer steels you for an increase in suffering, for feeling worse. "You tremble, carcass?" Nietzsche quoted one of his favorite Frenchmen. "You would tremble all the more if you knew where I was taking you." That's a loose quote and not a prayer, but it illustrates the point: that prayer at its most powerful is neither coping mechanism nor consolation, and to confuse its fortifying power with the mitigation of bad feeling is to make a profound error caused by the warping effect of viewing the world through a therapeutic lens darkly.
Joe is right to intuit that something about group helping raises more therapeutic suspicions than self-helping or even duo helping. The rise of collective therapy among the medically unaccredited, as Rieff prophesied, is an epochal event in human life, both historically and ahistorically speaking. Freud wanted everyone to be able to be an analyst, and was his own, but even he did not envision the e-puddles, cuddle parties, serial monogamies, and hookup herds that have characterized life since the 1980s. Still, of course, the therapeutic exercise can and is a project for pairs and singles, too. This extends to bible study but only in the same manner as I have suggested. The key to therapy today is that it self-consciously acknowledges a problem -- typically and characteristically the pain of contradiction -- and then self-consciously ameliorates, manages, and rhetorically argues against the existence of that pain by whatever means are at hand and useful to the task. So this is a good bit narrower a definition than what may have come before but I think the phenomenon as I account for it is also a lot more multi-purpose than 'talking cures' or whatever and by design.
For all these reasons there is a great and powerful and tempting affinity between the Christian vision -- of the brokenness of all humankind and our neediness of God and our permanent imperfection unless and until we are redeemed in divine reunion with the return of Christ -- and the therapeutic vision -- of the brokenness of all humankind and especially we moderns with crazy, mixed-up problems (cf. The Eagles, "One of These Nights"); of our collective neediness as a fragile species that cannot separate its minds from its bodies, and is uniquely susceptible as a species to suffering and uniquely undeserving of it (cf. Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals); and of our permanent imperfection amidst permanent, never-ending desires which may fleetingly but never finally be gratified or eliminated. For this reason love plays an increasingly profound role as the abstract unity concept under which all acts of therapy should fall. Martha Nussbaum is the primary exponent of this sort of mysticism, which lends itself in its therapeutic mode equally well to gnosticism and medicalism. Why not prayer and methadone? Tocqueville knew the appeal of pantheism in the democratic age, and the watering-down of Christianity is merging with the loving-up of therapy to create a broad 'Lennonist' cult of pain-mitigation which nonetheless desires all the commodious living the market can provide.
So although it is very unpopular, simply because, on its own terms, it is less effective than the alternative, self-reliant therapy is nonetheless quite possible. Indeed, therapy in its protean Pelagianism prescribes regular bouts of self-reliance -- 'me time,' self-indulgence, dating other people, just being alone tonight, vacations without your spouse, etc. etc. One opening act of this idea comes from Rousseau, who presented the Romantic soul oscillating between the feverish socialization of fellow-feeling and the solitary experience of communing with nature. But of course we are far beyond that simple Pong psychology now.
Therapy, like capital, can co-opt anything, often with ease. Religion, being often a universal but with residual commandments still dangling like chains, has a harder time, but Christianity, being the most radically universal and personal and humane of faiths, has shown itself particularly susceptible to being subsumed under the two big rubrics it helped make possible: economics and psychology. This is a great compliment for Christianity insofar as it reveals just how well Christianity works. But it also raises profound questions about the future of social order in democratic, 'secular', therapeutic times.
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